Constructivism and the Neoliberal Agenda in the Spanish Curriculum Reform of the 1980s and 1990s

This article challenges the assumption underlying most education reforms that constructivism is politically neutral and intrinsically democratic. It makes this argument by examining the curriculum reform in Spain during the 1980s and 1990s in light of the neoliberal politics that the country was experiencing at that time. This study employs the poststructuralist analytical lens of governmentality developed by Foucauldian scholars. Accordingly, it claims that, the psychological version of constructivism adopted by the official curriculum reform failed to deliver promises for democracy because it was crafted within the same neoliberal political rationality that redefined the terms of government in the late 1980s, a redefinition that decontextualized the learner from his/her social context and adopted the logic of the market.     

ePortfolios and eGovernment: From technology to the entrepreneurial self

Abstract

We analyse the electronic portfolio (ePortfolio) in higher education policy and practice.While evangelical accounts of the ePortfolio celebrate its power as a new eLearning technology,we argue that it allows the mutually-reinforcing couple of neoliberalism and the enterprising self to function in ways in which individual difference can be presented, cultured and grown, all the time within a standardised framework which relentlessly polices the limits of the acceptable and unacceptable. We point to the ePortfolio as a practice of (self-) government, arguing that grander policy coalesces out of a halting, experimental set of technological instruments for thinking about how life should be lived.     

Challenges to the Global Concept of Student-Centered Learning with Special Reference to the United Arab Emirates: ‘Never fail a Nahayan’

Student-centered learning has been conceived as a Western export to the East and the developing world in the last few decades. Philosophers of education often associate student-centered learning with frameworks related to meeting the needs of individual pupils: from Deweyan experiential learning, to the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and other social justice orientations. Yet student-centered learning has also become, in the era of neoliberal education, a jingoistic advertisement for practices and ideologies which can be seen to lead to a global devaluation of the educational profession, and the bolstering of the view of the student as a customer. In this article, I want to disentangle these views and explore some limitations of either model of student-centered learning. To add context, I consider education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) today, which provides an extreme example of the risks involved with prioritizing student’s self-identified needs and interests above all else, as in an idealized or exaggerated student-centered concept. I conclude with brief comments on amending the philosophical concept of student-centered learning to be useful in diverse contexts today.     

Extended review

This paper is a theoretical effort to support but complicate critiques of disaster capitalism and neoliberal strategies to profit from public education. We put into conversation a discursive analysis following Michel Foucault and a spatial analysis following Henri Lefebvre that focus on monumentalized disasters. We argue that neoliberalism carries out its agenda of privatization through public spaces that are never fully dismantled. We draw on empirical research into spaces that exemplify the usefulness of our reading of neoliberal privatization, including aspects of post-Katrina New Orleans and a more thorough case study of a pre- and post-earthquake Haiti and its highly privatized education system.     

Education and poverty in affluent countries

This article reflects on the desire to defend and claim public education amidst the educational policy effects of contemporary neoliberal politics. The defence of public education, from schools to higher education, undoubtedly provides a powerful counter-veiling weight to the neoliberal policy logic of education-as-individual-value-accrual. At a time of intense global policy reform centred on marketisation in education, the public education institutions of the post-war welfare state are often characterised as being lost, attacked, encroached upon and dismantled. In this paper, I contend it is important to avoid mobilising a memory of public educational pasts that do not account for their failings and inequalities. Turning to a historical engagement with the emergence of neoliberal politics, the paper explores how challenges and contestations surrounding ‘the public’ from multiple standpoints converged in the rise of neoliberalism. Recognition of these convergences and contestations, I suggest, assists to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between neoliberal reform and the welfare state, and thus of the complex task of imagining, claiming and working towards a just and equitable public education.     

谁改变了我们的常识?——美国教育保守主义运动与教育不平等

本文考察和分析了美国教育走向保守主义的趋势及其所引发的冲突和斗争。美国教育政策的保守趋势运动是多元的,存在着不同的取向,主要有四种力量构成新自由主义、新保守主义、威权民粹主义和正处在上升阶段的由专业人员和管理人员所构成的新中产阶级。本文侧重探讨了保守主义在改造美国教育的运动中居于领导地位的前两支力量,并认为在教育和社会政策领域,这些力量成功地构建成一个联盟,该联盟成功的重要原因在于对常识的改造,作者将之称为“保守主义的现代化”。     

“A Widespread Loss of Confidence:” TARP,Presidential Rhetoric,and the Crisis of Neoliberalism

This article analyzes the circulation of the term “confidence” as a prominent signifier for neoliberal logics, taking George W. Bush’s response to the economic crisis in Fall 2008 as a case study. It traces the public circulation of confidence in previous presidential administrations and notes that much like previous administrations, Bush’s response to the crisis was rooted in confidence. Bush identified a loss of confidence as the underlying cause of the economic crisis, and his focus on the need to restore lost confidence allowed him to violate his traditionally conservative principles in order to save the free market. Additionally, Bush’s reliance on the term in the context of the economic crisis articulated the nation-state to the national economy through neoliberalism as a prevailing economic logic.     

Producing soldier boy: sperm donation discourse and militarism in Israeli media culture

In this paper I examine the ways in which public discourse about the sperm donation industry in Israel, as appearing in mass media and advertising culture, bridges militarist, pro-natalist, and neoliberal ideologies. In constructing the sperm produced by combat soldiers as superior and in emphasizing the potential dangers of inferior sperm or the lack of enough sperm to meet demand, mainstream media and sperm banks adopt, utilize, and exploit a culture of fear that is linked to Israel’s perceived existential threat in order to serve their own commercial goals. At the same time, the tensions between national-collective and individual perceptions of gender and body occasionally rise to the surface, with media simultaneously embracing and questioning dominant cultural narratives concerning masculinity and militarism. Implications of the relations between media discourses of blood, sacrifice, and death, and those of sperm, reproduction, and cultural regeneration are discussed.     

Children in carts: digital rhetorics of Christian commission and capital

Compassion International is a prominent Christian humanitarian organization. Working primarily via a digital platform, Compassion International aims to connect financially stable sponsors with impoverished global children. This essay deals with Compassion International’s online sponsorship platform as an illustrative case study of a neoliberal media ecology and the digital, humanitarian, visual, and Christian rhetorics therein. Compassion International’s sponsorship platform presents a triad of appeals that (re)imagine would-be sponsors as digital missionaries fulfilling God’s commission, as stand-in family members, and, ultimately, as consumers. Compassion International’s sponsorship model is digitally rendered via a marketplace platform in which children are placed into virtual shopping carts. Both children and Christian users are, this essay concludes, coopted by a digital rhetoric of capital.     

Pastors of profit: Marketplace Ministries and the rhetorical acquisition of affective allegiance

This essay explores neoliberal capital accumulation by analyzing the workplace chaplaincy service Marketplace Ministries. By extending the value of traditional chaplains to the modern workplace, Marketplace Ministries discourse illuminates a discursive pattern that secular client-companies can employ to acquire the affective allegiance of their front-line employees. For these client-companies, affective allegiance activates a set of internal motivational strategies organized around the secularization of Michel Foucault’s pastoral power by penetrating the intimate domestic spheres of the workforce to shape subjectivity and promote new forms of obedience. Implications for our present milieu are considered including possible sites of contestation and resistance.